Turks Wage War on Social Media as Raging Fires
Turn Political
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under a
concerted attack by his opponents over his handling of the worst forest fires
in decades.
Turkey Battles Worst Blaze in Decades
Forest fires continued in Turkey after more than a
week as the country dealt with an economic crisis and the pandemic. The fires
are the worst the country has seen in decades.
Carlotta
Gall
By Carlotta
Gall
Aug. 4,
2021
ISTANBUL —
As Turkey battles its worst forest fires in decades, President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan is under ferocious attack for his handling of the disaster, as well as
his broader management of a country that was already battered by an economic
crisis and the pandemic.
Fires
blazed uncontrollably for the eighth day on Wednesday, aggravated by a
record-breaking heat wave that follows a prolonged drought. The nation has
watched in horror images on television and social media, as thousands of people
have been forced to evacuate homes, coastal resorts and whole villages,
primarily in the south, and herds of livestock have perished in fast-moving
blazes.
In a summer
of widespread extreme weather — from floods in Germany and Belgium to
record-breaking heat waves and wildfires in Russia, Italy, Greece, Canada and
the United States — the emergency in Turkey has given fodder to an increasingly
vocal and united opposition to Mr. Erdogan. Tensions are running high across
Turkey, where the government has long been accused of corruption and
mismanagement, worsening the country’s economic troubles and the crippling
effects of the coronavirus.
At least
eight people have died in the fires and dozens have been hospitalized,
suffering from burns and smoke inhalation. More than 170 wildfires have broken
out in the past week in 39 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, burning hundreds of square
miles of forest, and destroying farmland and dozens of homes.
Among the
dead were a couple waiting for their son to arrive and help them evacuate, two
firefighters whose truck overturned into a fire and a young volunteer ferrying
water to firefighters by motorbike.
A farming
couple reached by telephone Wednesday sobbed as they described how they had
been left to beat back the flames themselves, without help from firefighters,
when the inferno reached their village, Cokertme, on the Aegean coast in
southwestern Turkey.
The couple,
Nurten Bozkurt, 59 and her husband Cengiz, 55, took their livestock down to the
sea when military police ordered them to evacuate, but slipped back the next
morning to try to save their home and barn and surrounding houses from the
encroaching fire.
“My eyes,
my hands are still burning,” Mr. Bozkurt said. “I went to the barn, my wife
stayed at the house. Every three to five minutes fire was falling on the straw
and the manure heap.”
At the
house, Mrs. Bozkurt doused the roof and balcony whenever coils of smoke
appeared.
“We
succeeded,” she said. “We have saved 10 to 15 houses. We didn’t see any
firefighters.”
But the
forest around them was decimated and their livelihoods with it, they said.
“Around our
village there isn’t a place left unburned,” Mr. Bozkurt said, breaking into
tears. “Our biggest loss is the olive trees and pines. Most of all, they are
gone.”
The
disaster has affected mostly southern coastal districts that are held by the
largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., and local
mayors and party officials were quick to raise the alarm. But they soon
complained in interviews and video appeals that they were not receiving the
help needed from the central government — planes and helicopters to douse the
blazes.
Among the
criticisms of Mr. Erdogan’s government have been its mothballing of planes to
combat forest fires and its decision to contract for only three Russian planes
in their place.
Mr. Erdogan
faces re-election in two years and though he is still the most popular
politician in Turkey, he has been sliding in the polls. In a sign of the
looming political battle, government opponents and supporters have waged
concerted social media campaigns; critics attacked the government for failure
to fight the wildfires, and the government responded with accusations that they
were trying to undermine the state.
A social
media campaign, #HelpTurkey, took off early Monday morning, and in a matter of
hours reached 2.5 million tweets. Well-known celebrities joined the appeal,
calling for international assistance in combating the fires.
But there
were signs of a possible coordinated influence campaign behind it, Marc Owen
Jones, an associate professor at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar,
said in an analysis posted on Twitter. He found that the accounts that drove
the most traffic with the hashtag had changed their names and deleted their
tweets afterward, and many of them appeared to be phony identities or “sock
puppets,” tactics used in previous cases of political manipulation of social
media traffic.
Mr.
Erdogan’s director of communications, Fahrettin Altun, accused the opposition
of using a social media campaign orchestrated from abroad to undermine the
state. The government — which has been accused of running its own influence
campaigns in the past — and its supporters responded with hashtags like
#StrongTurkey and #WeDon’tNeedHelp.
“The
so-called aid campaign, organized abroad and from a single center, was
initiated with ideological motivations, with the aim of portraying our state as
helpless and weakening our state-nation unity,” Mr. Altun said in a statement.
“Our country, Turkey, is strong.”
The social
media combat continued Wednesday, with new hashtags from opponents calling for
Mr. Erdogan to go trending briefly.
The C.H.P.
leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, joined in the criticism in a speech Tuesday,
accusing Mr. Erdogan of failing to have a master plan in place for fighting
forest fires and warning that Turkey needed to prepare immediately for future
climate-related crises.
He also
criticized the government for turning on its critics with language that
suggested they were anti-state.
“When
people whose souls are so hurt call for help,” he said, “instead of
understanding them, labeling the people as terrorists and collaborators is a
tactic that only incompetent governments will resort to.”
Mr. Erdogan
has largely remained above the fray, promising aid for fire victims and
thanking foreign countries for their assistance with firefighting equipment and
planes. He traveled to one of the worst-hit regions over the weekend and
pledged to start rebuilding homes and barns within a month.
But
government officials and allies have sought to deflect blame for the disaster
back onto their opponents, suggesting that the fires were set by saboteurs, and
describing the appeal for help from abroad as an insidious plot against the
government.
Devlet
Bahceli, leader of the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party and a political
ally of Mr. Erdogan, called the opposition “opportunists using the forest fires
for political profit” and looking “for an environment to exploit our country’s
fragile and delicate environment.”
The
columnist Hilal Kaplan, known for her strong pro-government stance, wrote in
the daily Sabah that the social media campaign against the government reminded
her of the period in 2013 when popular protests took over the central Taksim
Square in Istanbul, and the attempted coup on July 15, 2016. She warned of
another coup against Mr. Erdogan’s government.
“There is a
strange activity,” she wrote. “As I was accused of being paranoid when I wrote
about the possibility of a coup four months before July 15, they will try the
same trick again.”
Carlotta
Gall is the Istanbul bureau chief, covering Turkey. She previously covered the
aftershocks of the Arab Spring from Tunisia, reported from the Balkans during
the war in Kosovo and Serbia, and covered Afghanistan and Pakistan. @carlottagall
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